Business continuance and disaster recovery planning, once considered low business priorities, have recently received increased attention, in the form of information technology (IT) professionals' focus on deploying business continuance and disaster-recovery network architectures that can withstand an array of disruptions ranging from catastrophic natural disasters, to acts of terrorism, to technical failures. To avoid costly disruptions—and improve customer service—enterprises may turn to intelligent networking capabilities to distribute and load balance their corporate data centers, where many of their core business applications reside. The intelligence now available in networking devices can inspect many variables about the content of an internet protocol (IP) packet, and, based on the information, direct traffic to the best-available, least-loaded sites and servers that will provide the fastest—and best—response.
A network using global server load balancing (GSLB) may direct users to the most appropriate data centers for their requests, improving the end-user experience. For example, a software manufacturer may offer its product via download from its Internet site but then the software manufacturer encounters customer satisfaction issues when download time is too long. An intelligent GSLB solution can determine which of the manufacturer's multiple data centers, located in disparate locations with mirrored content, is closest to the requesting client. A client in Asia can then receive content from a data center in Asia; a client in Europe can receive content from Europe; and a client in North America can receive content from North America. The result can be drastically reduced wait times for software downloads and increased customer satisfaction. In addition, an intelligent GSLB solution that can point the client to a local data center for content requests, instead of one located remotely, can save costly bandwidth and reduce the need for upgrades, saving upgrade expenses.